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Electronic computers are now able to figure
your bank balance... analyze cancer cells... study football
strategy... predict the weather... analyze brain waves...
and solve mathematical equations for the design of atomic
weapons, aircraft and furnaces.
Writing in the entertaining and easily understandable
style that has made him one of the more popular science
writers in the country, the author explains how these cybernetic
wonders are designed and built and how they work.
In a section on artificial intelligence,
Mr. Pfeiffer reveals other accomplishments of the computers:
writing scripts for Westerns, translating from Russian into
English, preparing indexes and abstracts. He discusses the
evolution of chess-playing machines, the latest models of
which play a "passable" amateur game, and checkers-playing
machines, which play a really first-rate game, and allegedly
could beat the world's champion human player if it were
allowed to practice about 5,000 more hours. And, in order
to explain how machines can be made that have "brains,"
he explains what is known about man's brain and how it works.
The last part of the book deals with the
future of electronic brains and what they may accomplish
in the world of tomorrow, including, perhaps, the solutions
to some of man's most pressing problems.
John Pfeiffer, a Yale, graduate, is one
of America's outstanding science writers. He entered the
field of science writing immediately after leaving college
in 1936 and has worked as science and medicine editor of
Newsweek, as science director for CBS, where he directed
and produced a series of radio shows on science and medicine
and gave a weekly science newscast, and as a member of the
editorial board of Scientific American, editing and
writing articles. Since 1950, Mr. Pfeiffer has been a freelancer,
living and writing in New Hope, Pennsylvania.
His by-line has appeared in Harper's,
This Week,
New York Times Magazine,
Playboy,
Natural History
and other magazines, and his earlier books include Science
in Your Life, The
Changing Universe, From
Galaxies to Man, and The
Human Brain.
Mr. Pfeiffer has also served as a consultant
on matters concerning the popularization of science to the
National Science Foundation, Unesco, The American Association
for the Advancement of Science, and various industrial companies.
He is a member of, and a former president of, the National
Association of Science Writers.
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